Friday, July 05, 2013

Updates: Mangum, Academic Freedom

First, Crystal Mangum’s long-delayed murder trial—the false
accuser has gone through several attorneys, slowing down the process—is now
scheduled, for mid-November. Mangum, who is supposedly financially destitute, posted
bond several months ago, and is currently free awaiting the proceedings.

Here’s
how the Herald-Sun described
Mangum’s infamy: “Mangum became nationally known in 2006 after she accused some
Duke lacrosse players of sexually assaulting her after they hired her as a
stripper for their party. Those charges were later dropped.”

No mention of the charges being “false.” No mention that the
state’s attorney general declared the players “innocent”—not merely that the
charges were “dropped.” And a bizarre description of Reade Seligmann’s and
Collin Finnerty’s role in the case, given that the quoted sentence—literally interpreted—suggests
that “they” hired Mangum for “their” party, even though neither of them played
any role in the organization of the party.

Such
slanting in hard-news items has become increasingly common in the H-S since Bob Ashley’s return as editor.
It’s almost as if Ashley wants to subtly shade post-case news coverage to make
up for the discredited manner in which his newspaper covered the case itself.

Along those lines: the H-S
applied its normal biases in covering Duke’s unsuccessful efforts to force me
to turn over confidential, unpublished exchanges with sources for the book and
the blog. The paper sympathetically portrayed Duke’s legal filings, triumphantly
reported on Duke’s short-term victory before the magistrate judge in Maine, and
mentioned my appeal. And then the paper suddenly lost interest—no analysis of
major Maine newspapers and TV stations filing an amicus brief portraying one of the
nation’s major research universities as hostile to the First Amendment; no
coverage of the hearing before Judge Brock Hornby in which Duke’s high-priced
attorneys found themselves immediately on the defensive, and in which they made
extraordinary claims about the future standards to which Duke’s own professors
should be held; no discussion of the collapse of Duke’s efforts and the
ultimate vacating of the magistrate judge’s order. As far as readers of the H-S know, Duke now has access to my
e-mail files.

The transcript of the January hearing is now publicly
available, and I thought it might be worth highlighting two exchanges that the H-S did not deem newsworthy—since Duke’s
attorneys, speaking (they said) for the university, articulated an approach to
academic freedom that I’m not sure any other research university in the country
holds.

The first exchange occurred less than a minute into Duke’s
oral argument:

THE COURT: Well, I do have two questions. One
is this, and this may be a rhetorical question, but Duke University obviously
has a lot of researchers and academics of its own who write books, and whatever
you’re seeking here may come back to affect Duke. So I take it this is the
institutional posture of Duke University in terms of the academic freedom
interests of its researchers and faculty members; is that right?

MR. SEGARS: Your Honor, I think Duke University
would be happy with the rule that it’s asking this Court to impose on the facts
of this case.

I expect
that the next time a Duke faculty member receives a third-party subpoena demanding
that he or she be deposed and turn over confidential, unpublished correspondence
with sources, this exchange will be cited.

The second
exchange came near the end of the proceedings, after Duke’s attorneys attempted
to mischaracterize my arguments:

THE COURT: I understand the argument [presented
by my attorney, Patrick Strawbridge] to be slightly different than that. I don’t
think there’s any claim that the plaintiffs cannot waive their own rights or
should not perhaps expect that they can be explored, but what does this do to
future academic researchers, and future journalists as they decide to publish a
book or decide to write something else? Do they know they’re thereby opening
themselves to considerable expense and time involvement in responding to lawsuit
discovery?

MR. SEGARS: That’s a good question, Your Honor.
I think that the rule we’re seeking would tell those researchers academicians,
journalists that, A, I need to be clear about the confidentiality I promised to
my sources, and B, if I’m ever subpoenaed I need to make a record of that confidentiality
with respect to the communications that I’m intending to withhold.

THE COURT: But it also says if I write a book I’d
better expect to spend a lot of time dealing with lawyers in terms of producing
all of the research work that I did and distract me from the next book I want
to write because I’m responding to what lawyers want for an earlier lawsuit,
right?

MR. SEGARS: That’s a fair question, Your Honor.
On the facts of this case where the subpoenaing party has literally gone out
and deposed 41 plaintiffs, we’ve subpoenaed the attorneys, we’ve tried to get
what we could, and I hear what Mr. Strawbridge says, that I am unable to point
to a particular document that Dr. Johnson has that I don’t.

To reiterate:
Duke’s attorneys said they’re entirely comfortable with this standard being
applied to Duke faculty in future cases. I wonder how many Duke professors are
actually aware of the new academic freedom rules under which their institution
operates.

KC, the Herald-Sun acted no differently than the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) does. In an earlier blog, you mentioned that when it comes to race/gender/class, race takes precedence, and this is especially so when the newspaper is located in a heavily African-American populated community which also has a large number of white liberals. The liberal media acts like attack dogs when it is sensed that a racial PC issue was transgressed (ex.: Paula Deen)but ignores the aftermath of its zeal if the result isn't to its benefit(ex.: the demise of the Atlanta Underground).As to holding the faculty to the new academic freedom rules, the rules will be changed as necessary when necessary (ex.: ObamaCare Employer Mandate). On another issue regarding the media, when the Gwinnett (County) Times, a conservative newspaper, achieved a circulation that threatened the AJC and was still increasing, the NYT bought the Gwinnett Times and shut it down. Collusion?

One has to understand Atlanta politics to understand why it failed twice as a tourist shopping mall. The AJC gave up the quest when civil rights were seemingly infringed upon in order to secure the area, Atlanta being the home of civil rights.

Mangum is on her fourth attorney.....If I count correctly. How many defendants in a murder case would be allowed the luxury and taxpayer expense of going through four different lawyers, firing one twice, causing two to quit...and then, demanding the court appoint a specific attorney (Holmes). Is this typical? Seems to me she has, once again, jerked the system around to her own advantage. WHO paid her bail? Anybody know? And just exactly HOW is this supposedly destitute woman supporting herself? Change the first three words in "destitute"?

Still OT, but still waiting for an acknowledgment from KC Johnson that he was wrong on this.

Jeralyn, at Talkleft:“Whether George Zimmerman is acquitted or convicted, and I am not making any predictions before hearing closing arguments and reading the jury instructions, the legacy of this case will be that the media never gets it right, and worse, that a group of lawyers, with the aid of a public relations team, who had a financial stake in the outcome of pending and anticipated civil litigation, were allowed to commandeer control of Florida’s criminal justice system, in pursuit of a divisive, personal agenda.

Their transformation of a tragic but spontaneous shooting into the crime of the century, and their relentless demonization of the person they deemed responsible, not for a tragic killing, but for “cold-blooded murder,” has called into question the political motives and ethics of the officials serving in the Executive branch of Florida’s government, ruined the career of other public officials, turned the lives of the Zimmerman family, who are as innocent as their grieving clients, into a nightmare, and along the way, set back any chance of a rational discussion of the very cause they were promoting, probably for years.

The problems of racial disparity and arbitrary enforcement of our criminal laws are real, systemic and need to be addressed. Criminal defense lawyers see it and fight to correct it every day. From charging decisions to plea offers to sentences, the system is not fair and everybody knows it.

But this case has never been representative of those problems. And perhaps most unfortunate of all, as a result of the false narrative created by the lawyers for grieving parents who tragically lost their son — a narrative perpetuated by a complicit and ratings-hungry media — any attempt at meaningful reform is likely to fall on deaf ears for years to come.”

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About Me

I am from Higgins Beach, in Scarborough, Maine, six miles south of Portland. After spending five years as track announcer at Scarborough Downs, I left to study fulltime in graduate school, where my advisor was Akira Iriye. I have a B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard, and an M.A. from the University of Chicago. At Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, I teach classes in 20th century US political, constitutional, and diplomatic history; in 2007-8, I was Fulbright Distinguished Chair for the Humanities at Tel Aviv University.

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"From the Scottsboro Boys to Clarence Gideon, some of the most memorable legal narratives have been tales of the wrongly accused. Now “Until Proven Innocent,” a new book about the false allegations of rape against three Duke lacrosse players, can join these galvanizing cautionary tales . . , Taylor and Johnson have made a gripping contribution to the literature of the wrongly accused. They remind us of the importance of constitutional checks on prosecutorial abuse. And they emphasize the lesson that Duke callously advised its own students to ignore: if you’re unjustly suspected of any crime, immediately call the best lawyer you can afford."--Jeffrey Rosen, New York Times Book Review